B2B social media is about connecting with prospects and customers,
providing value to their business and tracking those interactions to
leads and sales.

One of the beautiful things about digital B2B marketing is the
ability to attribute behavior and engagement for prospects across a
variety of channels that may be included in our marketing mix. Where
things get a bit sticky is determining how attribution figures into
revenue generation. For a simple transactional sale, this may be easier
as sales cycles are shorter and less clicks are usually required. But,
for a complex sale, attribution becomes a bigger challenge.

The mandate for B2B marketers today is to prove that their online
marketing programs are contributing to downstream revenues. Determining
how attribution is used can vary those results by quite a bit.

Take the example that Adobe uncovered in their recent report. The difference for retail companies that applied first-click
attribution over last-click attribution is 88% higher using fist-click.
The report contends that social media is used earlier in the buy cycle
to generate awareness and engagement and that applying the credit to
whatever the shopper clicks on last, right before purchase, discounts
the role social media plays in driving revenues.

This is a great example to start with. Sure, retail is more
transactional in the example, but if you think about the number of
clicks involved in a complex B2B marketing-to-sales process, using
either first or last click to determine ROI will definitely reduce the
value of a lot of elements in play during the buyer's journey.

This is why a content marketing strategy is so important. It's also why technology and analytics are so darn valuable.

Think about your marketing mix for a minute. Let's say you are using
the following geared to address the priorities of a specific target
market (persona):

Twitter

Blog

Webinars

Nurturing programs (series of emails with links to content assets mapped to stages of the buy cycle)

White papers

Demo

ROI Calculator

If the prevailing trend is for a buyer to either visit the demo or
the calculator prior to initiating contact with sales, it may be that
tools like those get more credit than they deserve when reporting on
ROI.

Or, because registrations for webinars are directly attributable, it
may be thought that they payoff handsomely for lead generation when the
reality could be that without your Twitter promotion, your webinar
registration would have been 40% lower.

What's needed is to consider all of the conversion or transition
points for your marketing programs and measure ROI based on what they
are designed to accomplish in concert.

Every content asset and marketing mix element needs to have a goal
for a conversion within the buying journey that contributes to the
overall revenue generation process. The ability to string these
conversions together and show how each contributed to achieving the end
result determines the ROI of the strategy, not each individual component
as a standalone tactic.

Getting to this type of ROI analysis takes hard work, focus and
technology. But it's what makes the world of eMarketing and digital
strategy so dang compelling.

It all starts with shifting the way we've always thought about and done it in the past.